Preparing to be impaired

I started French in ninth grade, Spanish in eleventh, and studied both of them, as well as Italian in college. I picked up a tiny bit of Norwegian and German too, because language was just my thing. (Also, my English is quite good.) When I was going to go on a mission, I knew I would speak a language. I had no idea it would be Lao. I mean, I needed to look up what that even was.

Many times when learning it, I would think about how much better I could do if it were one of the languages that I already knew, and then I sort of realized that was the point. The Lord needed me to be humble, and any other language would not have led to that result. I had to learn how to study differently, parts of speech came to me in different ways than they had with other languages, and often when I was given what I needed to say it was clearly through me, not from me, because I did not even really know what I had said when I was done. It was how it needed to be.

I have been thinking about this lately because I have been sick for just under a month now, and I am so tired of it. There are all of these things that I want to do and just cannot get to. I am tired. I am racked with coughing. I have no voice. And honestly, my brain has not been running at full capacity.

It started while I was on vacation. In preparation for the vacation, I was getting a crazy amount of things accomplished, and if some of them weren't quite as good as I wanted them to be, I was still getting things done, and then I was going to have a good vacation, and come back and start tackling even more things.

I have not tackled much. I am almost at the end of my 40 days on the Amazon Studio submission, and I have done nothing with it. I have not revised any of the other screenplays, or updated my LinkedIn profile, or networked, or any of that really. I have been too busy coughing, oozing, and wishing I were dead.

As much as I have tried to power through it, I have not been greatly successful, because it keeps adding on fun turns. At first it was just a bad, long cold. So I was waiting it out, and then it turned worse, with the addition of bronchitis, and then I got pinkeye. If we keep adding new diseases, this could go on forever! And I keep thinking about all the things that I need to do, and should do, and mean to do, and wishing that I had some energy.

I have still managed to accomplish some things. I have been able to keep up the blog. Some of the posts have not been my best work, but some of them have been kind of good. This one last week felt like a rehash, but it felt like the right way to go, and it got 12 hits almost immediately after posting, so I guess someone needed it. I did make someone happy. I did add some new scenes to some of the existing screenplays and they worked. They added elements that were needed.

I keep feeling like I should be capable of a lot more, and when running at full capacity I am, but maybe the lesson of being weighed down is to make choices and set priorities. I can't do everything, but I am going to do this. Have I made the right choices? Or are there even right choices in this set of circumstances? I don't know.

Perhaps it teaches me to be grateful for small accomplishments and graces in the absence of big ones. Well, at least that one worked out. At least I did see that one post. At least I'm telecommuting so no one has to hear the coughing fits. (And I have been doing a great job at work, thank you. I just have less mental energy left for real life when I'm done.)

So I am going to try and be philosophical about this, and make the best of it. My throat does hurt less today, and my brain is less cloudy, so maybe I won't be sick forever. And although I  have not been exercising, no appetite has kept the scale going down. I know some of it is dehydration, but probably not all of it. I've really been trying to drink.

Regardless, if I am sick forever, I will still find ways to accomplish some things, and I will still find pleasure in that. It will be even more pleasure if it stops being interrupted by coughing.